On the postcard from Madame Tussauds, the five guillotined heads looked like a joke. Fake and distinctly non-scary. The lighting was all wrong – nothing like the room itself. Louis XVI looked like Rick Parfitt from Status Quo, which gave me a good line. I’d already put the name of one of my Brisbane school friends on the card, and under it I wrote, ‘Looks like a Sex Pistols fan decided he’s heard “Rockin’ All Over the World” one time too many.’

As soon as it was written, I wondered if, as a group, the heads looked more like Smokie, but the Status Quo reference was already there and would have to do. And Rick Parfitt’s head would have done for Louis’, easily.

It took two tracks to write three postcards. I hadn’t heard from any of my friends in Brisbane yet. For our first two weeks in London we were in the hotel in Kensington, and there was no point in giving them that address since we were planning to leave as soon as we found a place. When we moved into Clarence Road, my mother had change-of-address cards printed, which took another couple of weeks. I sent mine as soon as she picked them up from the printer, but in Brisbane everyone was deep in exams by then. They were finished now, though, and aerogrammes were surely on the way, some kind of contact.

My friends back home were on summer holidays, while I was counting down to the Friday before Christmas and an end to the term. An end to work encountered halfway through, algebra I’d studied almost a year ago but in a different way, a period of British history I’d never thought about. A break from the endless gags about being a convict, or going walkabout.

I cracked once, after a whole lunchtime of it. I told them my O’Connell ancestor – the source of my surname, my several-greats grandfather – went to Australia with Lachlan Macquarie, as the head of the soldiers guarding the convicts. I told them he ended up as a general, and was knighted by the king.

‘Oh, knighted?’ one of them said, bunging on a Prince Charles accent. ‘One completely failed to anticipate that we had another titled personage amongst us. My lords, I give you the Baron of Château Chunder.’

It stuck as a name. Of course it did, sometimes shortened to Lord Chunder. One of the others brought a Monty Python tape to school and they all backed me into a corner and forced me to listen to the Australian table-wines sketch. Black Stump Bordeaux, Côtes du Rod Laver and, of course, the sluice-opening Château Chunder. They’d quote the sketch any chance they got. In assembly, I’d hear a creak from the row of seats behind, and then a sniff near my shoulder and a voice whispering, in best Python ocker, ‘bouquet like an Aborigine’s armpit’.